Visualizing the World with Cairo's Trend Compass

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While the events of Tahrir
Square have irrevocably opened the door for economic policy change
in Egypt, the transition has, in the short-term, favored companies
that focus on a global market. Cairo-based IT services company
EPIC Systems,
for one, was able to shield its business from local economic
fluctuations by selling software abroad. Yet, as founder Hisham
Abdel Maguid revealed, the choice to sell overseas was made out of
necessity, since selling specialized products, such as a five
dimensional data visualization package Trend Compass, proved near impossible in a local
market. Given the wave of optimism and gradual reform
sweeping the country, however, Abdel Maguid notes that the time to
focus on purely local product may finally be at hand.

How did you come up with the idea for Trend Compass? When was it
developed?

Hans
Rosling, a Swedish professor, created a nonprofit organization
called GapMinder, while
doing research for the U.N. After having difficulties explaining
the data, he and his daughter came up with the idea to remove the
variable of time from the x-axis, and put it in the background,
creating a unique kind of graph. Google then bought the idea from
him and essentially put it in a drawer. We were approached by a
customer who was interested in using GapMinder’s functionality but
wanted his data to be confidential. So we began developing Trend Compass in 2008. It took us 1.5 years to debug
it, tweak the user interface, and add geographical
localization.

How do you compete with
Google: Visualization: Motion Chart, which was released in late
2008? What is your business model?

We sell
Trend Compass as proprietary software. Our edge is offering
confidentiality. Only individuals use Google for free; most
companies don’t want to share their data with Google. After a
one-time charge, you can download the software and do whatever you
want with it, including easily embedding graphs in PowerPoint, AVI
& HTML. We are adding a statistics package soon as well. Our
exposure may not be as big as Google’s, but we have garnered
several clients, including Deutsche Bank, RIM (Blackberry),
Vanguard Institutional Investor, Ipsos, and Princeton University,
and we just completed a large deal with NBC Universal, who uses
Trend Compass for their research team on customer behaviour &
interaction on cable networks.

After
working at IBM, I left the IT business about 15 years ago, because
I realized that I was not innovating. If you come up with a new
idea, then you are in business. Startup capital wasn't a challenge-
I used my own capital. But marketing and advertising have been a
big challenge. I wish I had bigger exposure in Europe and the
States. I find it much easier for my product to move in those
countries than in the Middle East. I haven’t sold a single package
inside Egypt.

How did you form your
team?

I found
my partner through the internet. He had been arabizing Flash for
Macromedia, which was bought by Adobe, and he was local to Egypt.
It got my attention that someone was able to make such a deal with
Macromedia. This is what I was looking for.

How much of your success
do you attribute to having the right team, and how much to
innovation?

I’d say
our success depends 60/40 on innovation and team. Finding my
partner was great, because he generates a lot of great ideas, but I
add value by overseeing the implementation, because I know how to
make a product good for the user and how to sell it. It’s all about
creating a balance between a great idea and translating the idea
into the real world.

How has the recent
change in government affected your approach? Do you see new
opportunities opening up? What new challenges?

Things
will take some time to get back to normal. The upside is that the
corruption is on its way out. Maybe once businesses will start
incorporating more planning and research into their models, I might
have local market for my product. I was hugely disappointed that I
could not sell Trend Compass here.

Now we are developing a couple
of new ideas aimed mainly at a local market: a decentralized
database for pharmacies that offers real time access to prices and
stock at each store, and an online 3D Virtual Reality shopping
center (see the prototype).
Because of the traffic in Cairo, it’s a huge hassle to go to the
supermarket. And often supermarket workers don’t have stock
lists, so calling is a waste of time. This will make shopping
efficient and more like an online game.

In general, there is a price for
this democracy that will affect this country for awhile, but I have
never felt as patriotic as I do now.